Five promising movies sent off the rails by a single disastrous scene
There are few better feelings for film fans than watching a movie and finding yourself getting more and more into it with each passing scene. The sense that you’re in the hands of a good director and top-notch actors who know exactly what they’re doing to realise the vision of the film is both exciting and comforting.
Sometimes, this feeling sustains until the end of a movie, and you come out of it vibrating with the sheer potential of cinema. Sometimes, though, something strange happens at a certain point in the film. Everyone has experienced it: a movie is proceeding nicely when suddenly it takes a sharp turn and changes into something else entirely.
There are times when this kind of gamble has paid off for a movie – From Dusk Till Dawn and Barbarian are two good examples. However, there are arguably more where the risk taken in one particular scene cuts the legs out from under a film, or a story decision fails to land and causes everything to veer wildly off the rails.
This list will look at five promising movies undone by one such scene. From superhero blockbusters to boundary-pushing horror to beloved indie darlings, these movies all threw caution to the wind – but it didn’t pay off for them.
Five movies sent off the rails by a single scene:
5. Tusk (Kevin Smith, 2014)
Kevin Smith is a unique enigma in Hollywood. He’s one of the prime indie filmmaking figures of the 1990s and a geek God, and at one point in time, he seemed poised for a fascinating career in the vein of peers like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and Robert Rodriguez. That seems silly now, considering Smith rarely pushes himself beyond his insular fan community these days, but it really was a possibility. Indeed, the last time Smith tried to break out of the Clerks and Jay and Silent Bob rut he’s created for himself was in the early 2010s, when he made the religious horror Red State and the utterly bonkers body horror Tusk.
The story of a podcaster, played by Justin Long, who travels to Manitoba, Canada, to interview a wheelchair-bound seaman, played by Michael Parks, Tusk, establishes a good atmosphere in the early going. The acting by Long and Parks is excellent, and for a while, it seems like Smith might have made something capable of breaking free from his usual potty humour and pop culture-referencing confines. Then, the movie plays its hand, and the audience discovers Parks’ character is hellbent on transforming Long into a harrowingly grotesque, yet undeniably ridiculous-looking, walrus man.
As the film proceeds, it turns into something that resembles Smith trying to make a David Cronenberg movie – and Smith is no David Cronenberg. Some of the imagery in the film is genuinely stomach-churning, and Long and Parks do their best to make it all mean something, but it simply can’t help descending into absurdity and silliness too often. In truth, though, Smith did succeed in his ambitions for the film. As he put it, “I just wanted to showcase Michael Parks in a fucked up story, where he could recite some Lewis Carroll and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ to some poor motherfucker sewn into a realistic walrus costume.” Um, in that case, job done?
4. The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises has a strange reputation in film circles. It was well-reviewed at the time and made a ton of money, but over the years, an undercurrent of fan resentment built up against some of the choices Nolan made in the film. It’s now derided in some circles, especially in comparison to the first two entries in Nolan’s trilogy. For our money, though, it’s one of the better third entries of any franchise – until it goes off the rails late in the game.
Here’s the thing: The Dark Knight Rises is a long movie. At a butt-numbing 164 minutes, a lot of which doesn’t actually feature Christian Bale in costume, it’s the sort of movie that was always going to live and die by its ending. So, when Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman arrives in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out brawl between Batman and Tom Hardy’s Bane that the entire film has been building to, and summarily shoots him to death without the beefy bad guy uttering a preposterously muffled word from behind his mask, it’s an enormous anticlimax.
The film then stumbles into one of the worst death scenes ever committed to film – the uber-lame demise of Marion Cotillard’s Talia al Ghul – and has Batman fake his own death. By this point, the rails can’t even be seen anymore, and the anguished screams of fanboys are all that can be heard when Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s John Blake finds the Batcave and reveals his middle name is ‘Robin’.
3. Bone Tomahawk (S Craig Zahler, 2015)
There are two types of people in this world: those of us who have seen the “wishbone” scene in Bone Tomahawk and those who are blissfully unaware of its existence. For much of S Craig Zahler’s 2015 horror western, events unfold at a leisurely pace, allowing the viewer to soak up the gritty, foreboding vibes and marvel at the cast Zahler managed to assemble. Surrounding the iconic Kurt Russell are Richard Jenkins, Patrick Wilson, Lili Simmons, and cult horror icon Sid Haig, which is pretty cool. Heck, Russell even sports a similarly preposterous handlebar moustache to the one he’d show off less than a month later in The Hateful Eight. That’s got to count for something.
However, it becomes apparent that Zahler isn’t just making any old horror western when he traps his main cast in a cave with a group of truly terrifying-looking Troglodytes. These burly, face-painted cannibals then set upon one of Russell’s posse in a manner so shocking and so gruesome that it simply has to be seen to be believed. I’m trying not to throw up in my mouth even as I think about it.
The main problem with the scene is that once you’ve seen it, you need a very strong stomach to continue with the film, which then descends into a claret-soaked cavalcade of carnage. I persevered, but I can’t say I was entirely happy I did so. One thing is for sure, though: you’ll never be able to snap a chicken’s wishbone again without getting flashbacks.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, 2022)
There are a few hills every cinephile is willing to die on. Everyone has that one actor they can’t stand, yet the world seems to love, or a film they think is amazing even while the rest of the world tells them it isn’t. The particular hill I am willing to die on, though, is this: I don’t get Everything Everywhere All at Once. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that, in years to come, people will look back on its Academy Award dominance and say, “What were we thinking?”
Now, I realise that most cinemagoers loved the Daniels’ absurdist martial arts action comedy drama. I can’t really understand why, but when an independent movie makes $143million and wins seven Oscars, it must be doing something right. Personally, though, I found the film to be a classic case of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – and then destroying the wall in order to erect another bigger, crazier wall to also throw things at. The movie had some interesting ideas and a few good performances, but I was also left baffled by most of it.
For me, the moment the movie went off the rails was when it took us to a reality in which everyone had hot dog fingers. As I watched Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis try their hardest to sell real emotion while comically touching each other with floppy, sausage-like appendages, I felt like I was having a bad trip. The insane mash of tones had simply overwhelmed me at that point, and the movie had gone so far off the rails that I could barely think straight.
1. Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup, 2022)
In 2024, Hollywood remade Speak No Evil with James McAvoy, Scoot McNairy, and Mackenzie Davis. It was a decent-sized hit at the box office and did a fairly good job of translating the simmering menace of the Danish original. However, for anyone who had seen the original, the remake was conspicuous for changing the final act. It made the ending of the film more palatable for a wider audience, that’s for sure, but it also lost the raw power that the Danish film had.
You see, the Danish movie, as directed by Christian Tafdrup, went to a place no Hollywood movie would ever dream of going – and in doing so, went completely off the rails into a realm of terror any parent could feel in their very soul. When Tafdrup actually showed the film’s villainous couple severing a child’s tongue to stop them from telling anyone that they’ve been kidnapped, it was a scene so upsetting that it was almost impossible to recover from.
If Bone Tomahawk’s wishbone scene dared the audience to go along with its bloody violence, Speak No Evil’s version of going off the rails poked at a fear much, much more deep-seated and primal. In fact, the scene was so depraved that it ruined the film for some viewers – and that’s probably why Hollywood said, “No thanks.”
